Mar/Apr 2004
Issue #134
Beauty in the Bronx
How can we build housing for low-income families that is more like home? That might sound like a lot to demand of mere bricks and mortar, but it is consistent with the broad range of activities that we call community development. Unemployment, poor health, unsafe housing conditions, inadequate education and discrimination all chip away at our ability to make a home. What would it take for us to build housing that fostered a sense of well-being? And where would we begin?
The Experience of Home
The voices and images in The Guided Tours at Urban Horizons vividly illustrate the importance of good, safe housing in supporting mental and physical health and successful parenting. Social science […]
The Guided Tours at Urban Horizons
The Guided Tours at Urban Horizons is part of my ongoing series of collaborative projects involving people in their personal spaces. This project with the residents of Urban Horizons reveals […]
Public Dollars and Private Interests
Until the mid-1960s, Chicago’s West Madison skid row was home to mostly low-income single men and women living in over 2,800 units of often badly run down single-room occupancy (SRO) […]
Planning for More than Housing
Barry Meister has heard the rumors, and denies them emphatically: He has no plans to relocate Steel Craft, the small factory he owns in the Ironbound section of Newark, NJ, […]
The Betrayal of Mount Laurel
New Jersey has been seen as a leader for its efforts to create suburban affordable housing opportunities. But that may now be coming to an end.
More Than a Roof
It’s common for most people to make a distinction between “house” and “home.” One word defines a roof over one’s head, nothing more, nothing less; the other often signifies something […]
Shelter Shorts
One Of A Kind Jane Wood, longtime New York City tenant activist, died in March at the age of 96. Wood began fighting to help the poor in the 1930s, […]
Power of (Ex)change
An organization dedicated to “youth empowerment” sends a proposal to a sympathetic funder. The proposal contains this sentence: “We seek nothing short of revolutionary social change.” They then describe their […]
Predatory Bender
Predatory Bender: A Story of Subprime Finance, by Matthew Lee. Inner City Press. 2004. 360 pp. $19.95 (paperback).www.atlasbooks.com or www.innercitypress.org/books.html. I have to admit, I approached Predatory Bender with low […]
Marshall E. Crawford, Jr.
Not many of us can say with any degree of certainty that we know what it is we were truly meant to do. We count ourselves lucky if we end […]